Abstract

This manuscript addresses the relationship between geography and memory in the poetry of Philip Levine and Gary Snyder.

My first and second chapters deal with Levine and Snyder's use of physical geography, and with their allusive return to specific places, in order to map memory and to investigate the nature of their own processes of remembering. They trace the ongoing role of place in their poems, and their obsession with the landscapes of rural California, the Pacific North West, and industrial Detroit.

Chapter Three investigates their exploration of spirituality through landscape. It considers the relationship between Buddhism and ambiguity in Snyder's work and suggests that Snyder's poems are not autobiographical vignettes peppered with Eastern iconography, but open-minded explorations of a philosophy's strengths and weaknesses that form a composite portrait of a mind coming to a philosophy. This chapter also addresses Levine's use of poetry to explore and test his Jewish faith, The Old Testament's place in his poems, and his ambiguous use of Christian revelatory and apocalyptic symbolism.

Chapter Four argues that these poets work as historians, and that they construct an alternate history of the Cold War world. It deals with Vietnam-era poems set in America, and with nuclear-energy obsessed poems that atypically approach the surreal. It also investigates the poets' evolving conceptions of poetry's ability to bring about political or ideological change.

Chapter Five focuses on their autobiographical prose and personal essays. Specifically, on Snyder's Passage Through India and on Levine's The Bread of Time, and it examines their identity construction across genres.